


scorch

by serenfire



Category: The Flash (TV 2014), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: ColdFlash Week, Kid Fic, M/M, Maze Runner AU, Michael Snart AU, absolutely no WCKD puns in here AT ALL, guess what movie I just watched
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-22 18:03:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4845149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenfire/pseuds/serenfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which STAR Labs is WCKD, Barry is their prized Immune kept for harvesting, and Len is a Scorch dweller who needs Barry’s blood to cure his son of the Flare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one: anaesthetic aftertaste

**Author's Note:**

> This is much more based off the setting of movie canon than book canon because it's been like two years since I read TMR but I watched TST two days ago.
> 
> @anyone I know irl: do not read thanks

**0500 HOURS, S.T.A.R. LABS EAST WING**

Guards patrol the corridor outside the harvest room, machine guns held easily in their arms, blue-gray camp suits pristine and formidable. The two standing watch over the room itself trade jokes and humorous moments found over the course of their day to each other, keeping an eye on anything out of the ordinary. One yawns, showing her teeth and stretching her lip ring. 

“We could have gotten a better shift,” she mutters to the other, scraping her steel boots on the carpet. A doctor in scrubs serenely wheels a sedated Immune past them, swiping her ID and waiting for the door to buzz green. 

She’s not been seen in this facility before. The guard guesses she’s a survivor from Outpost B. 

The other guard snorts. “At least we’re not on patrol duty. I heard we lost a new kid to the Scorchers yesterday.” 

The guard with a lip ring shakes her head in remorse, the metal adorning her face jingling. “I don’t understand Scorchers,” she says. “All our efforts are for them, and yet they _continue_ to resist—” 

Behind them, the door to the harvest room explodes outward. 

**0500 HOURS, S.T.A.R. LABS CONTROL ROOM**

“I’m in,” Len whispers on his Bluetooth as he twists the knob open to the unassuming room, stashing his lock picks in his back pocket. 

His words are muffled through the cloth wrapped around his face, a floral pattern faded by sand, well-worn. 

The door opens smoothly on its oiled hinges, and exposes the three men hunched in chairs, gazes glued to security camera screens, adorned with heavy headsets. 

“Right,” Len says loudly, slamming the door and flipping the safety off his M60. “All your base are belong to us, _fuckers_.” 

In his ear, Lisa cackles. “Why resurrect old memes when there are perfectly good new ones to test out?” 

“The old ones stand the test of time,” Len explains as he zip ties the men’s hands together, keeping half an eye on them as he flips through the cameras to find the one he needs. “You ready to detonate? Mick?” 

“Ready,” the other man says, and Len hears the sound of falling bodies as the man finishes disposing the last of the rear door guards. 

“Go, Lisa,” Len says, and watches as Lisa takes several steps back with her empty covered gurney, and detonates the bomb. 

The security camera is blown to bits, and in his ear, Len hears Mick’s loud laugh. “You in alright?” he asks, grin wicked. 

“Wonderful,” Mick says, pulling his face cloth off and coughing up sand residue. From a further camera, Len can see the two slowly wheel into the harvest room, surveying the hundreds of bodies strung up. 

“We’re on the clock,” Len reminds them. “Not enough C4 to blow another exit out.” 

“Yeah, where’s the body we want?” Lisa asks. “Not like there’s signposts in here, bro.” 

“Longest term storage is in the back corner, near the holoscreen wall. Those are the ones that are undoubtedly Immune,” Len sighs, and points his M60 at a tech who appears to be trying to shimmy out of his restraints. The tech immediately wilts and starts to cry. 

“Don’t give me that,” Len mutters at him. “When you routinely kill dozens of us every day, I can point a gun at you, no questions asked.” 

“Right,” Lisa drawls, and she’s gesturing to the camera’s blind spot. “You seeing this, Lenny?” 

“Nope.” 

“I think this might be your guy. He looks very—experimented on,” Lisa says. “Mick, take his feet.” 

Len watches as the two of them manhandle the sedated man into the fake gurney, and cover him up with the sheet. The security cameras show nothing _that_ unusual about the Immune, and aside from the dozens of tubes running from his scalp all the way down to his waist, covering his chest arms and fingers, he would look naturally asleep. 

“Mick, there’s a regiment heading for the breach,” he says, flipping through the cameras. “We can’t fight this one out, so Lisa, take the Immune out the way you came in. No one will suspect a doctor.” 

“Right,” she nods. “I’m just taking an injured patient out to the med bay. Absolutely nothing suspicious happening here.” 

Mick grabs his automatic from where its strapped around his back, flipping the safety off and running through the hole in the front door and wall beyond without so much as a whoop for good luck. 

The outer cameras Len accesses show nothing but dark blue fog rolling in the sand dunes. 

No way the STAR guards will be able to track in this weather. Len laughs, and tests a desert slogan on his tongue. “But as for us Scorchers, we’ll be fine.” 

He meets Lisa outside of a side door, unattended by any guards. 

“No one even looked at me twice,” Lisa grins, gleaming. “Now help me with the kid.” 

‘Kid’ wasn’t a good description, Len finds as he helps Lisa pick up the unconscious man. The man has too many unconnected tubes piercing his body, like wires stemming from his brain to his limbs, for him to be considered a kid. 

And as Len thinks of that term, he feels sick to his stomach. Somewhere back at home, Michael is asleep and unconcerned about the fate of his family or himself, and inside him, a virus slips around, dormant until excited by activity, and he’s a living death sentence. 

Len holds the Immune tighter, pulling out all the needles from the man and watching as he starts to bleed from a million wounds. Slinging the man across his shoulders, he puts on his face mask. 

“We need to be quick,” he says. “I’m assuming Mick isn’t waiting for us with the bike.” 

“I heard the guards taking pot-shots at his tires minutes ago,” Lisa says. “Guess we’re walking home.” 

Len puts back on his goggles, the plastic scratched and smudged with fingerprint oils. He and Lisa walk through the sand dunes, the weight of a person on his shoulders, the cure to all Len’s troubles. 

He doesn’t notice the tracker on his boot. 

**1320 HOURS, ROGUE CAMP**

Barry Allen hasn’t felt physical pain since the Maze. He hasn’t felt the overwhelming sense of panic and desperation since a Griever pierced his side, and then slid a blade through Eddie’s heart. He relives his friend’s death every sleeping moment of his life. 

He’s only woken up a few times since being sedated, usually because technicians test that his motor functions and higher intelligence still work perfunctorily, and to bathe. Those moments are still hazy with anesthetic aftertaste, brushing his skin off with soap and watching blood bubbling from the volcano that is his skin. He doesn’t even relish the feeling of being awake, even though sleep is filled with nightmares and unexplainable panic. 

This waking up is different. His brain is whirring faster than before, more efficiently. Synapses fire and Barry _remembers_ more than Eddie’s death played over like a bloodbath for his emotions. He remembers the Maze, and can picture the green of the grass. He remembers what it felt like to laugh with Iris and the feeling of utter helplessness when he realized that the escape from the Maze was into the heart of STAR itself. 

His body burns, now, from a hundred tiny pinpricks in his skin. He’s on no painkillers, and every time he breathes his stomach tears anew. He opens his mouth to make the first sound in months — years — a raspy cry for help and morphine. 

“Hey,” a voice says, as equally raspy as Barry’s brain. “You awake?” 

Barry shakes his head, igniting his nerves on his neck. They burn from atrophy, not from the pain of phantom needles. 

“Where am I?” he asks in a whisper, feeling the burn of the sun against his eyes, less shaded than any STAR facility. “Am I in the Scorch?” 

“You could open your eyes to see for yourself,” the person grins. “Or do your eyes hurt? Is it painful to open your eyes to light if you’ve been asleep for months? Hey, _Lisa_!” 

Barry flinches at the raise in volume. 

“What?” another person, _Lisa_ , calls back. 

“If the Immune opens his eyes, will it hurt?” 

“How am _I_ supposed to know that?” 

Barry gives up and opens his eyes. There’s a mesh covering between where he lays and the sun, blocking out the worst from his sore eyes, and he adjusts to colors that do not match the dull gray walls of STAR. 

Here, the walls are covered in multicolored graffiti, half in decay. In the middle of the derelict building, there is an assortment of rundown couches and chairs, a table set up feet from where Barry is lying on the floor, a giant FM radio on it, buzzing slightly. 

Barry looks at himself. He’s covered in a million Band-Aids, shades off from the color of his pale skin, with crusted blood spilling out of every one of them. Dimly, he’s aware that if he’s lost that much blood he needs to replenish his iron. 

“Right,” he says slowly. “Where am I?” 

“The Scorch, of course,” the person says, still sitting next to him against the foot of the couch, a book dangling off his fingers. Barry looks at him and sees a man with short hair, wearing a darned tank top and camo jeans, floral cloth wrapped around his neck and industrial goggles stashed on his head, above his intelligent eyes. 

“You’re not STAR,” Barry notes. 

“And you _are_?” the man asks. 

“I don’t know who I am,” Barry says. “Why am I here?” 

“You’re here because you’re immune to the Flare,” the man says. “We were wondering if you would mind donating blood as a temporary cure for my son.” 

“Your son?” 

The man nods, and cranes his head to the hallway beyond. “Michael!” he shouts. 

A kid, not five years old, comes toddling out of an adjoining room, a shining face on display and wrapped in bright clothes. Barry begins to think that all Scorchers have such a unique fashion sense as the man in front of him. 

The kid walks over to the man and sticks his hand out at Barry. “I’m Michael,” he says with a prominent lisp. 

“Barry.” 

“And I’m Len,” the man interrupts. “Why don’t you go see what Hartley’s working on?” 

“I heard he was trying to build more C4,” Michael says. “D’ya think he’d let me help?” 

“Always worth asking,” Len says, and Michael walks back the way he came. 

They both watch as Michael disappears around the corner. 

“His mother?” Barry asks. He almost doesn’t want to know, but the kid looks absolutely nothing like Len. 

Len shrugs. “I don’t know who his parents are. I rescued him from STAR, too, when he was just a baby.” 

“So you’ve been doing this for a while, then,” Barry grins. 

“Guess you could say that. I don’t make a habit of breaking into STAR, but there were extenuating circumstances both times. So, will you donate blood for him?” 

Barry picks at the band-aids on the back of his hand, where the IV had been attached for so long. His skull aches. “Sure,” he says. “Right now?” 

“I’ll take you to our doctor if you want,” Len says, standing up and offering Barry a hand. He takes it, wincing at the pain. 

“You wouldn’t happen to have any morphine or the like on you, would you?” Barry asks. 

“Doc’s orders were that you shouldn’t take any meds until the cocktail of sedatives washes out of your system, so you’re in it for the long haul for the next forty-eight hours, _Barry_.” 

“Great,” Barry sighs, and follows Len, gingerly working his leg muscles. They cramp, and he feels the needle pains, but he doesn’t stumble. 

Len leads Barry through the mess of hallways, walls half-crumbled on either side and reinforced with metal beams, to a room with cabinets full of pill bottles and syringes. Barry blinks, swallowing down the unwelcome flashback of the STAR med center, where they wiped his memories, and later wiped his consciousness. 

A grinning man around Barry’s age greets them, an oil rag draped over his shoulders. He sticks his hand out to shake Barry’s, and Barry gingerly takes it, smelling the cleaning fluid in the air. 

“I’m Cisco,” the man introduces. “And that’s Caitlin, and Hartley, and Lisa. Would you all mind relocating somewhere else? I have actual doctor work to do now.” 

“Right,” Caitlin says, and picks up her assortment of swords and sharpening stones from the haphazard pile. “Good to meet you, Immune.” 

“It’s Barry,” he says. 

Caitlin smiles warmly. “Barry,” she repeats. “Thank you for helping us.” 

“It’s not really my choice, is it?” he says before he can take the words back, and oh, how he wants to now. 

Everyone in the room turns to him with a mystified look on their faces, glancing between Len and him. 

“What?” Lisa asks, frowning. “What do you mean?” 

Barry laughs self-deprecatingly. “I mean, you did _kidnap_ me from STAR, after all. It’s not like I can just _go_.” He spreads his arms to gesture to the Great Outdoors beyond them. 

“Of course you can just go,” Len says, a hint of a frown on his face. “I mean, this _is_ the Scorch, after all. You sure you want to?” 

“You kidnapped me,” Barry repeats, louder. “You ripped me out of my machine and you high-tailed it to this building because I have blood that’s precious to you. My blood’s precious to everyone, and it’s not like STAR forced me—” 

He stops, hitting blank memories. 

Barry doesn’t remember being given to STAR, though, or signing the fated contract that allowed them to push Barry to the brink of death. They told him his supposed history, but Barry’s never had a chance to prove it. He doesn’t remember anything. _Did_ STAR force him? 

“Are you okay?” Len asks, touching his shoulder. Barry starts, and the man is suddenly by his side, stabilizing him with a touch to his back, a spot on his body not in constant pain. 

“No,” Barry hisses. “ _Very_ not okay.” 

“Do you want to go back to STAR?” he asks. 

“ _No_.” The answer is out of him before he can choke up an explanation, and before he knows it, he’s hit a flashback. 

_The Grievers are right in front of him, blocking the exit to the Maze. After Barry’s worked so hard for this, and so many people have died, he can’t_ not _make it out._

_“You go,” Eddie hisses, drawing his sword. “Get out of this and find the real world for me, would you?”_

_“Eddie, no,” Barry warns. “Don’t do this. You can’t just sacrifice yourself. There_ has _to be a way we all get out of this together.”_

_Eddie presses the ring into Barry’s hand, the one he meant to give to Iris before everything went to shit. Iris stands ten feet behind them with the rest of the group, covered in Griever blood, brandishing a sword and watching the unmoving creature with wary eyes._

_“Please,” Eddie says._

_Barry closes his hand around the ring and pockets it. He is numb, for the first time since he woke up in the Maze. “Okay,” he says, voice not above a whisper. “Do it.”_

“Just take my blood,” he bursts out now, to the congregation of Scorchers around him. He brandishes the crook of his arm, still swollen and the track marks evident. 

Cisco trades uneasy looks with Len, but when Len nods, he cleans off the crook of Barry’s abused arm and proceeds to take vials of his blood. Barry doesn’t feel it. He is numb now. 

“You’ll be okay,” Len says, a hand on his shoulder. “They took your memories, right?” 

Barry nods miserably. He doesn’t know how Len knows this. 

“When you remember, you’ll be okay,” Len says. “We’re not keeping you confined here, but if you want to stay with us, you can.” 

Barry smiles, pained. He wants to say, _This isn’t a new flashback_. He wants to say, _I haven’t remembered anything from before the Maze_. 

He wants to say, _Help me._

He just smiles. 


	2. two: static

Barry sleeps, and the wind outside is like a dripping faucet, unending and unforgivable. He lays curled up on a mattress in the corner of a small room, completely alone. The door is just out of reach, but Barry can’t leave now.

He feels the slow burn of healing marks over his body and wants to scratch the layers of skin off.

Just out of his consciousness, he picks up faint static from the main room.

The wool blanket is itching his wounds and the night is too cold to be opposed by it, so Barry stands, stretches, and walks to find the static.

In the main room, Len is hunched over the radio, hair sticking to his forehead, still wet. He wears large headphones with an unused mic attached to them, hooked up to another machine with wires spouting from it — like Barry’s previous body — and he has a well-worn notebook opened to a blank page in front of him, pencil poised and at the ready. His headphones leak sound, and as Len turns the radio knob slowly and watches the numbers tick on the analog screen, the static changes in pitch and words start to form.

“I didn’t know there were radio broadcasts,” Barry says, and Len whirls around, ripping his headphones off.

“Startled me,” the man mumbles in explanations, turning back to his activity. He nods at an empty stool beside him. “Take a seat, if you want.”

Barry does. He looks at the radio and doesn’t know why he thought one way or another about desert radio. STAR must have told him, but if so, he can’t _remember_ it.

Len unplugs the headphones, and the creaking static comes out of the radio itself. “There aren’t any official radios in the Scorch,” he explains, and shrugs. “Officially, none of us exist.”

“So what are you listening for?”

Len resumes his knob twisting. “The Right Arm should be issuing a field report any minute now,” he says. “Obviously, STAR will never be able to hear it, so if you go back—”

Right. If Barry goes back to STAR, where they held him, unconscious, for a period of time only marked in the monthly increments of Barry waking and falling asleep again.

“I’m not going back,” he says absently, scratching at his pockmarked arms.

He thinks he sees Len smile widely out of the corner of his eye, for a second, and on the radio, someone starts to speak.

“—planned and executed a rescue mission two hours ago, and immediate reports are that it was successful, that STAR troops are wandering in circles and Group A has arrived at the rendezvous on time. Group B says they will be waylaid by the electric storm, but have all twenty unconscious STAR test subjects. In response, we are calling for a meeting of all squad leaders on Wednesday at headquarters. The password to the safe house is ‘herring’. I repeat, the password is ‘herring’. We will discuss the transportation of the former test subjects to the Safe Zones.”

The announcer’s voice fades to static again, and Len hits the antenna. The static fizzles but does not regain speech.

Len looks down at his hurriedly jotted notes. “We got enough, I suppose,” he says.

“Are you Right Arm?” Barry asks.

“Not officially,” Len says. “Never been to headquarters, but we traded with some in their higher echelon and they introduced us to the broadcast. So, they got forty of you out.” He grins tiredly, wiping the perspiration from his face. “I’d call that a definite success.”

“So, Right Arm coordinated a group effort to get forty of _me_ out, and you staged your own mission to kidnap _one_ of me? What’s with that?”

“Lisa wanted to test the new concoction of C4,” Len shrugs. “We don’t have enough resources to get forty people out. Do you know that you were hooked up to twice as many machines as the rest of them?”

Barry feels the swollen pads of his fingers. “I can guess, yeah,” he says.

They are quiet except for the static, fading into background noise.

“Why did you volunteer for STAR?” Len asks. “Did you know they were going to keep you asleep for years? Did you know about the Maze?”

“I don’t remember,” Barry confesses. “I don’t know anything about who I was before the Maze, and _if_ what STAR told me is true, then I might not want to know.”

Len doesn’t pry, but rests a hand on Barry’s shoulder.

Barry doesn’t feel very comforted, and says so.

Len laughs. “My intentions weren’t as pure as that,” he confesses with a sly grin.

It’s Barry’s turn to laugh. “Oh, were they not? I didn’t notice.”

“Do you mind?” Len asks, gesturing with his hands.

Barry quirks his lips. “Sure,” he says, and leans into Len’s touch as the older man kisses him.

Len slides his hands behind Barry’s neck and rests them there as they match lips again. His hands press light enough not to irritate the scabs where needles have nested, and Barry huffs a light-hearted laugh into Len’s mouth.

“That’s nice,” he smiles as they break apart. The mood is subtle enough that he’s still breathing easily, the lull of insomnia pulling at his veins.

Bare footsteps echo on the tile outside the room, and Barry breaks apart from Len as Lisa steps into their vision, a machine gun strapped to her back and a face mask already donned. Her bleached hair falls down her shoulders, tangled, brunette roots blending into her scalp in the three o’clock light.

“Len,” she says, smiling widely, voice muffled by the mask, “I see you’ve wasted no time at all corrupting Barry.”

Barry bites his lips, still tingling from the suction. One of Len’s hands still rests behind his neck, almost possessively.

Barry can’t think about the implications of that now.

Len doesn’t respond to her prodding. “And are you starting up the patrol again, or are you going to the garden?”

“Garden?” Barry asks.

“Underground,” Lisa explains. “Experimental venture.”

“In the _desert_ ,” Barry continues.

“We didn’t make an underground garden to grow food,” Len explains. His hand is still behind Barry’s neck, warm and comforting. “We built it to claim the floor of the building it’s located in. It’s the lowest floor, almost at the ground level beneath the sand. It also has access to a sewer pipe system that we’ve mapped to entrances miles in the direction of the mountains.”

“Cool,” Barry nods.

Lisa says, “Word from the people who live on the floors above is that the Cranks finally found a way out of the sewers and into the floor, that it’s infected. I just need to see if it’s true.”

Len catches her hand in his, and says seriously, “Stay safe.”

“You know I always do, Lenny.”

“Then stay more safe than usual.”

“Will do.”

Lisa walks out of the main room, prying open the bolted shut door leading to the surface. Outside, the sounds of the wind increase and sand hits the floor like pennies as Lisa scowls, securing her goggles, and slams the door shut behind her.

“She’ll be safe,” Len assures Barry. “She always is.”

He wipes the residue sand from his hands on his jeans, and Barry flicks it off his stinging body as well.

“You want to continue what we started?” Barry asks to break the silence.

Len grins. “Of _course_ I do.”

“Awesome,” Barry says, breathing into Len’s mouth and guiding his hands to his neck.

***

The next morning, Barry wakes up in an uncomfortable position on a couch, lying half on top of Len, who’s still snoring. He blinks and looks around, watching the sun shining through the glass panes in the walls and the mesh overhead. The hideout looks so much calmer in the morning, without the threat of sand in the dark to propel Barry into a nervous sweat.

He detaches himself from Len’s sleeping form and adjusts his hastily-donned clothes. His shirt has been inside out.

Barry doesn’t know why he did anything last night, but he doesn’t regret anything that happened.

He stands and stretches, feeling his scabs ache with residual pain under his clothes, and watches the sun beat down overhead.

A memory washes over him, as cool as the early morning breeze wringing his neck.

_The walls of the Maze crowd out the Grievers beyond the closed doors, but Barry can still hear them crawling around, metal attachments clinking. He sits next to the campfire, Eddie to his left, downing moonshine from a dirty glass bottle._

_Barry stares into the flames, watching them crackle. Eddie’s back from running through the Maze, and his sweat-soaked shirt sticks to his torso._

_“You think I’ll be able to do what you can do?” Barry asks, the back of his throat muddy from alcohol._

_“What, run through the Maze?” Eddie raises an eyebrow. “It’s not that difficult if I’m the one keeping track of the turns.”_

_Iris walks by, waving at Eddie, who grins widely and waves back._

_Barry feels something curl around his heart, warm and_ jealous _. He can’t pinpoint of whom he’s jealous._

_He drags his toe through the dirt. “Do you think this is all that’s out there?” he asks, gesturing to the Maze and the sky, far above the walls. “This death trap and whoever’s sending us Greenies?”_

_“We’re an experiment, right?” Eddie asks. “I don’t know what they’re testing, but there has to be a reason. Unless we_ are _the last people in the world and this is nothing but a cruel joke on humanity.”_

_He laughs, drunken and bitter._

_In retrospect, after witnessing his demise, Barry knows that this was what marked him for death._

“Barry, are you okay?” Len asks, and Barry blinks out of the vivid remembrance, the colors of today washing over him.

He grabs Len’s outstretched hand, as calloused as he remembers it being last night, and looks wildly into his eyes. “I’m fine,” he manages to croak out, and there’s blood _everywhere_ in his mind’s eye, blood that he has not washed out from under his fingernails or off his jugular.

“You were hyperventilating,” Len says, easily resting a hand on Barry’s collarbone. Barry swallows deliberately, watching Len’s face as his throat bobs.

Len’s eyes darken.

“I’m okay,” Barry whispers, and leans in for a kiss. Len accepts his lips, capturing them in a gentle embrace.

From behind them both, Cisco clears his throat loudly, and Barry jumps away from the older man. Len just calmly turns around to look at Cisco, a ghost of a smirk on his lips.

“Well,” Cisco begins, his face flushed, “I guess Hartley won the pot on _that_. Anyways, I have finished cleaning Barry’s blood and this would be the best time to do the procedure.”

Len’s face transforms, blossoming into happiness. There aren’t tears on his cheeks, but he does hug Barry, light enough so that it doesn’t hurt his scabs.

The front door opens with a loud bang, the wind whistling beyond it, startling everyone. Len turns around, and Lisa walks into the building, slamming the door shut behind her and tearing off her face mask and goggles.

Her face is grim, and she tosses the empty magazine in the air to Len. “Rumors were right,” she says in the way of an explanation. “Cranks have taken over our floor. We have to figure out a new emergency escape route — why is everyone _happy_?”

“It’s time,” Len says, giddiness barely contained. “We’re going to save Michael.”

Lisa smiles, and cranes her head to look at the sun in the sky. “Is the little crank even _up_? I swear, Lenny, if you wake him up early for this, he’s never going to forgive you, and neither are we.”

Cisco says, “After the procedure, he’ll sleep the rest of the day, so it doesn’t matter.”

They gather in the makeshift doctor’s office, having woken Michael up. He sits on the table, rubbing sleep-bleary eyes and scratching at his Crank bite. Having worn long sleeves in Barry’s presence, he hasn’t noticed the kid’s bite, but it’s right over the crook of his arm, puffy and infected, a full set of teeth marks in the poor kid’s skin.

Cisco swabs the wound down, wiping off the newest layer of puss. “We’re going to make this thing go away now,” he tells Michael while Len squeezes his son’s hand. “And then you can sleep for the rest of the day.”

He takes out a syringe from the icebox, filled with a translucent green liquid.

“That’s what’s left of my blood?” Barry asks, surprised.

“Ew,” Michael exclaims. “That’s his _blood_?”

Cisco makes condescending eyes at Barry. “It’s the only thing that can heal you, Michael,” he says, “and I’ve already taken out anything to do with his DNA, so it can’t kill you.”

“Cisco,” Len sighs, “you can’t tell Michael that — the only thing it’s going to do is get rid of the bite on your arm, okay?”

Michael nods and yawns.

Cisco ties fabric around Michael’s upper arm and pushes the syringe in, emptying it into his arm. Michael doesn’t make a sound, just watches as Barry’s doctored blood empties into his veins and heals him.

Barry feels slightly queasy.

“Awesome,” the five-year-old yawns. “Can I go back to sleep now?”

At this moment, the front door to the abandoned building explodes.

As Barry’s ears ring and he stumbles, recovering from the blast, the people around him move in a coordinated manner.

Cisco quickly removes the syringe from Michael’s arm and tosses it in a bin. From underneath the cabinet, he brings out an automatic gun, hefting it like he knows how to use it.

Len is picking up Michael in one arm and in the other, brandishing a handgun from its hiding place. Lisa takes the gun strapped to her back and reloads it mechanically, her face stony and unmoving.

Hartley bursts in the door, and Cisco lowers the gun from his face.

“STAR’s knocking at our front door,” Hartley breathes. “I bought us some time, but we have to make a run for it.”

Lisa scowls. “Our tunnels are overrun with Cranks,” she says, “but that’s our only way out of here.”

“We have enough ammo,” Cisco says, tossing more magazines at the armed people. “We can make a run for it.”

Someone touches Barry’s arm, shaking him. Barry looks up blearily. He hasn’t felt an explosion like this since — since —

The memory is _right there_ , just out of reach.

“We have to go, _now_ ,” Len tells him.

“What if I can’t?” Barry asks, feeling the soreness spreading over his body.

“Then they’ll kill you first and check to see if they know you second,” Len says. “Please, Bar. We _have to go_.”

Barry nods blearily and stands up. Len winds an arm around him, supporting him, and they follow the Rogues out the back entrance to the building. Between their hall and the main room, rocks have piled up to block the entirety of the hallway, and beyond them, Barry hears low murmurs of soldiers’ voices.

As Lisa leads the way, kicking rotting doors open and pointing her semi-automatic in front of her, Len curls his arm even more protectively around Barry.

“Were you expecting this?” Barry asks, voice dry and cracking.

“Not this soon,” Len says, on the verge of breaking down. He holds Michael in his other arm, and the boy is pressed into his shoulder, openly crying. “Not this fucking soon.”

Lisa kicks in the door to the outside open, and sunlight streams in. The wind has stopped, and the sand dunes are still.

The Rogues empty out into the sand, and Lisa points to a speck of a building in the distance. “That’s our ticket to across the bridge,” she says, and Barry can palpably feel relief in his veins.

“Drop your weapons, Rogues,” a voice on speaker calls out, and everyone with a weapon points it at the source of the sound — a helicopter flying high in the sky, out of range.

Soldiers stand up from behind the sand dunes, in beige camouflage, their tan weapons pointed at the Rogues. Barry stumbles, falling to his knees, unable to stand any more.

“Why are you doing this?” Lisa yells at the helicopter for good measure, silently gauging the STAR soldiers forming a circle around them.

“You have our Munie,” the person on the helicopter says, and Barry is completely numb. STAR wants him back, and they are prepared to _kill everyone_ to get it.

“Yeah?” Len screams, defiance in his eye. He puts Michael down behind him and latches onto Barry as a shield, pulling him up off his knees and pressing his limp body against his chest. He takes aim at the nearest soldier. “You want him alive? You _come get him yourself_!”

**Author's Note:**

> It would be really nice of you to follow me @ my [tumblr](http://www.tylerjosephstoast.tumblr.com).


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